Obscenity In Popular Music

As briefly mentioned in the previous paragraph, potentially offensive content such as swear words, sexual references and drug references are quite often grounds for censoring by radio stations, governments and society in general. Music censorship even occurs as a result of an artist speaking openly about their political views. One such example is when songs by Dixie Chicks were no longer given airplay on American radio stations due to the band’s lead singer, Natalie Maines, insulting President George W. Bush at a performance, ‘…we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas’ (Rossman, 2012). The musicians were blacklisted largely due to listeners of said radio stations complaining that they were still playing the band’s songs. The songs themselves were not considered offensive, yet they were restricted from playing on the radio purely because Maines stated her view of the …show more content…
Artists speaking out about their political views is becoming more and more common, as is obscenity in popular music. Cuss words in songs are ‘bleeped out’ on radio, however artists, particularly rappers in the 21st century, are choosing to create two versions of their songs; a ‘dirty’ one and a ‘clean’ one (Benesch 1994). This is known as self-censorship and is not as controversial as other types of censorship in relation to freedom of expression. In fact, Neil Strauss (2000) believes that, ‘the editing… actually improve[s] the song… bringing a touch of subtlety back to urban music’. ___________ Furthermore, by recording two versions of a song, an artist has a chance to earn more profit as the ‘cleaner’ version could be played anywhere while some people prefer to listen to the original explicit version. Ultimately, censorship of music is a violation of an artist’s freedom of expression, but on the other hand, an artist has the freedom to choose to censor their own music if they so